NEW DELHI: India's Home Minister has clothes. Too many, it would seem.

As police grope for leads in the five bomb blasts that killed 23 people in the national capital on Saturday, Home Minister Shivraj Patil was spotted wearing three different suits that day in the space of four hours.

Already under intense pressure to quit over his handling of internal security, Mr Patil has now come in for more flak for his sartorial elegance.

Newspapers and television channels on Monday carried pictures of the dapper minister draped in a cream close-collared suit at 6.30pm, minutes after the first of the blasts rocked the capital.

Two hours later, he had changed into a darker suit for a press conference at his residence, and at 10pm when he went on a tour of hospitals to visit victims, he wore a white safari jacket and trousers.

'He hits the wardrobe as Delhi burns', was the banner headline in the Mail Today tabloid the next morning.

A text message joke doing the rounds had Mr Patil reacting firmly to the situation with an 'enough is enough' attitude, before the kicker scrolled up: 'Fires personal assistant for misplacing his white shoes and comb.'

Egged on by a vigilant and irreverent media, friends and foes alike are targeting him.

'The country has to choose between national security and the Home Minister's sartorial splendour,' BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday.

Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, Mr Patil's coalition ally, has also been critical.

On Monday, he met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party boss Sonia Gandhi to urge a special meeting of the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition to discuss the terrorism issue. Though he did not name Mr Patil directly, he lashed out at the functioning of the intelligence agencies and demanded a task force to deal with the situation.

Mr Patil, always a natty dresser and prone to wear white patent leather shoes in the manner of diamond merchants in his native Maharashtra, is increasingly seen as an ineffectual figure.

When a thuggish politician targeted Hindi-speaking migrants from northern India in his home state recently, he stayed silent.

Last week, when the same politician targeted Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan's wife for saying she preferred speaking Hindi to the local language Marathi, he was again without words, leaving it to Mrs Gandhi to defend the Bachchans despite her estranged ties with that clan.

Mr Patil said on Monday that the government had definite information that Delhi would be targeted by terrorists, but had no idea when and where they would strike.

Early last month, a special tribunal struck down a ban on the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi), blamed for some of the terror attacks in the country over the last few years, after Mr Patil's ministry failed to provide enough evidence to justify the ban. The Supreme Court then stepped in to stay the tribunal's order.

A group called Indian Mujahideen, seen as an offshoot of Simi, claimed responsibility for the Delhi blasts in an e-mail to news channels sent minutes before the first blast went off.

But for all the criticism he is facing, Mr Patil may be secure in his job for now, analysts say.

Congress spokesmen have rushed to defend him, and firing or replacing him may be seen as an admission by the party that it has failed to tackle the terror menace. Mr Patil's unflinching loyalty to the Gandhi family also works in his favour.

Reacting to the mounting criticism against him, Mr Patil said on Monday: 'If the leadership is not with me, there is no point of staying here. I am not in much demand. I am here just because of them (the leadership).'

velloor@sph.com.sg